Chinese capital just placed one of the largest bets yet on humanoid robots. Sharpa, the startup founded by the co-founders of LiDAR maker Hesai, has raised more than 4.5 billion yuan (about $669M) at a reported $3.3B post-money valuation and opened what it calls the first fully autonomous humanoid robot restaurant.
The investor list reads like a who’s who of Chinese tech: Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, JD.com and Transsion, plus institutional backers HongShan, Qiming Venture Partners, Luminous Ventures and Meituan’s Long-Z Investments.
Founded in 2024 by Hesai’s three co-founders, CEO David Li, CTO Xiang Shaoqing and chief scientist Sun Kai, Sharpa is building general-purpose humanoid robots. The funding announcement came one day before the launch of a “zero-modification, fully automated, all-year-round” Dairy Queen restaurant on Wujiang Road in Shanghai, where its humanoids work 10 am to 10 pm daily.
The company says the flagship site marks the first time humanoid robots have operated fully autonomously in a real-world commercial food-and-beverage environment. “The key to robotics commercialisation is not performing a single task once, but consistently executing complex tasks in an unmodified real-world environment over the long term,” Li said.
Proceeds will accelerate core R&D and push the robots from technical validation into real-world deployment. The deal is among the largest rounds yet for a humanoid robotics startup, signaling that Chinese capital is now willing to bet billions on embodied AI.
